A4000 troubles.. Please help!

[stopthegop]

Hello,
Its been several years since I've actively used an Amiga. Through the latter half of the 1990s I was enlisted in the military and simply couldn't afford a really nice Amiga.   Thats past, and lately I gotten the "bug" to put together a nice A4000.  

Through various sources I've acquired the following:

-Working A4000D with Rev. B motherboard (battery removed).
-Working CyberstormPPC card 604e@233/68040@25.
-New Norway ethernet card
-New Indivision scandoubler
-OS 3.1 upgrade kit (disks and ROMs)
-OS 3.9 CD

I'm having two problems that may or may not be related:

1) The display quality is horrendous using the scandoubler.  Its barely visible and has that translucent "onion skin" effect.  Monitor is NEC 15" Multisync, which looks fine when hooked to a peecee.  

2.  I can't get the *^%$ IDE CDRom to work to save my life.  Its a standard 24x ATAPI drive, jumpered as a slave to the 2G hard drive, which is jumpered as master.  I've tried the other way around, but the machine won't bott at all in this case.  I have ASIMcdfs, but it locks up during install after I select to use the 'inquire' utility.  

Does anyone know how I can get OS3.9 installed in this situation and/or how to fix it so the CDRom is recognized?  Also, any ideas on the display problem?  Any and all help greatly appreciated!!  Thanks      

[tonyvdb]

First I would reinstall the CD rom driver as this may be the first issue. (AsimCDFS is good for this) Is the CDrom driv in working order? try a different one.

[scuzzb494]

Hi

What screen resolution are you using..?

I found my scandoubler a bit fuzzy on the A4000 till I hooked it up with a Picasso.

Get IDEfix ( think its on Aminet ) and run this. It will pick up the CD no problem. I just installed a CDRom on my A4000d and IDEfix worked a treat. Also check the ribbon. My original ribbon wouldn`t work with the CD as someone had snipped the red edge... there is a reason for this but I can`t recall why.

scuzz

[stopthegop]

Thanks.  Will try IDEfix and have another go.  I think the screen resolution is set to "NTSC Hi-res non interlaced"?  It doesn't seem to matter which one I select, they all appear as though the "brightness" control is turned all the way down (but its not, I checked).  Anyway, my hope is that by installing 3.9 the display problem will fix itself...  Wishful thinking, perhaps?

[stopthegop]

Thanks.  Have tried it with two CD drives, same results regardless of which one I use.  I'm thinking SCSI may be the way to go, but
1)I don't have a SCSI CDRom drive
2)I only have one scsi controller -the one on the accelerator- and that one I want to reserve for a nice fast Cheetah drive when I get it.  Won't having a slow scsi I CDRom drive bottleneck everything on the SCSI II bus of the cyberstorm?    

[drewz21]

Well, I've got an A4000D with a similar setup.  Do you have the 3.1 floppies to boot off of?  A few times, since I had no data on it I needed to save, I formatted my IDE 4.3GB hard drive with my 3.1 floppies usind HDToolBox, then installed ASIM 3.1 with my floppy disk.  Works like a charm.

Best of luck.